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In This Issue...
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Business
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Allstate Insurance Agent Ronald Kaplan Makes It a Policy to Serve Others
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Allstate Insurance Agent Ronald Kaplan Makes It a Policy to Serve Others
By Linda Fridy
Ronald Kaplan likes things that last, whether they are the relationships he’s built with customers over his 21 years as an Allstate insurance agent or the jazz standards he loves to sing. In both arenas he works to shape an end product with individual style.
While insurance and music may seem at first to be an odd combination, Kaplan has found harmony moving between one’s precision and the other’s innovation. And both have brought him long-term friendships.
This desire for ongoing connections with customers rather than one-time purchases led Kaplan into insurance from sales.
“I liked the idea of being of service. Everyone needs insurance. I thought, ‘If I provide good service and save people money, why wouldn’t they want to do business with me?’” he explained. “I wanted to retain customers I met in my previous sales experience.”
Kaplan Had to Start at the Very Beginning
Yet even with these connections, building a new business was not easy, as a family friend had warned him in a letter Kaplan keeps to this day.
“I had to draw on all my inner strengths and skills to become a success,” said Kaplan, who noted that insurance’s attention to detail suits his personality. “I worked very hard in the beginning to build up the business. Here I am 21 years later.”
As an Allstate agent, he provides products from home and property coverage to auto and life insurance, giving him an opportunity to be a part of significant junctions in his clients’ lives.
“It’s been wonderful to watch some of these people grow up to be wonderful young adults,” he said of the generation he started insuring as children.
Making a Living in a Place He Loves
Although he’s a native of Hollywood, Kaplan has lived more than half his life in Santa Cruz County. He came as a junior transfer student to UCSC and never left.
“I’ve put one and a half of my kids through (UC) as well,” he said with a smile.
The insurance industry has changed some in the 21 years since Kaplan moved into his Soquel Drive office in Aptos. While computers have sped up processes, he admits to missing the eye-to-eye contact of going out and writing up an application.
The whole industry is writing fewer policies and looking for ways to remain profitable, he said. Heart-breaking stories from Katrina, where homeowners were insured against hurricane damage but didn’t have flood policies, underscore the need for people to check in with an agent.
“I try to review people’s needs, let them know things they may not have thought about,” he said.
He said that people interface is also important in other aspects of insurance purchasing.
“Computers make decisions that people used to make,” he said. “I see myself as an advocate as much as I can for customers with the insurance company.”
Knowing he can help has kept him in a career he describes as “really rewarding. The love and caring you develop over time with people makes it all worthwhile.”
Returning to His Musical Roots
About 10 years into his career with Allstate, Kaplan had an established business with steady income from renewals. He hired an assistant, which allowed him to focus some of his energy on his lifelong love of performing.
“That was like my middle-age crisis, as my daughter calls it,” he said with a smile.
While he had embraced the singer/songwriter trend of rock in the early 1970s, Kaplan found himself drawn back to the popular music of his youth: the jazz standards of the great American songbook. His father played trumpet in jazz bands and his mother listened to radio and records throughout the day.
“That music still holds up today. I really believe it was the zenith of American songwriting,” he said, sitting in his office surrounded by jazz festival posters and framed sheet music.
He wanted to experience the best of both worlds. With this in mind, Kaplan returned to singing and performing as his insurance work allowed, and recorded his first album in 1996.
Helping him out on piano was friend and local jazz great Smith Dobson.
Luckily for his family, Dobson was also a customer, and when Kaplan delivered Dobson’s life insurance benefit after his untimely death, it brought home how important that service could be.
Kaplan has recorded four more albums since that first one, and plans a sixth of New York City-inspired tunes, which he hopes to record in New York.
The recordings have also provided a way for him to connect to an international audience.
“People all over the world download my music on iTunes or Rhapsody.com,” he said.
He hasn’t abandoned the live, local audience and still performs regularly in the area. He can be found most Thursday nights sitting in with Don McCaslin at Severinos at Best Western’s Seacliff Inn, or the Wharf house in Capitola on Sunday afternoons
The American Songbook Preservation Society
Kaplan’s passion for jazz standards also led him to found the American Songbook Preservation Society, www.greatamericansongbook.org, which supports performances of this American art form. His long-term goal is to raise a $25 million endowment.
While singing standards realizes a dream of Kaplan’s, he is equally grateful to have found a career with Allstate.
As he explained, “It’s afforded me the opportunity to live in Santa Cruz, raise a family, be a professional and make a difference in other people’s lives by being their insurance agent.”
Ronald Kaplan is an exclusive agent for the Allstate Insurance Company with an office at 9051-A Soquel Drive in Aptos. You can reach Kaplan at his Aptos office at 831-688-7312.
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